James Madison (Richard Brookhiser)

An unexpectedly good read. Short and to the point, dynamic, even exciting biography of the "Father of the Constitution" and founder of the Democratic (then called Republican, i kid you not) Party. Good introduction to the first four American presidents and their times. The politics is surprisingly "modern" in the bad sense. At least he was able to use his genius for niceness and not for evil.

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Quotes:

Scottish teachers were popular in mid-eighteenth-century America because they were sparks from a furnace of intellectual life. Scotland was a poor, small country, but it was unusually literate,

Madison hardly ever wrote or spoke of his beliefs, then or later. Did he have faith? Had he lost it? The most he ever said, in a wintry letter at the end of his life, was that “the mind prefers” the idea of an infinitely good, if invisible, God.

Eighteenth-century letter writers on opposite sides of the Atlantic began to fear that their letters were lost only after seven or eight months had passed. They lacked the blessings of Twitter and Skype; what they got in return was leisure to think.

Jefferson’s letter implied two far more radical ideas. Property is only a secondary right, since society allows it “for the encouragement of industry,” and the right to earn a living—“to labor the earth”—precedes it.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Three months after Washington’s inauguration, the Bastille fell. Louis XVI’s ministers had been trying to reform France’s finances (which had been strained, in part, by its support of the American Revolution). Now reform had provoked a new revolution.

Hamilton’s reaction showed the weakness of his strength. He published a ninety-five-page pamphlet of his own, denying that he was corrupt by admitting that he was an adulterer; he printed both his mistress’s love letters and her husband’s blackmail notes.

“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home” occurs under the threat of “danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

The Alien Act allowed the president to deport any noncitizen foreigner he thought “dangerous to the peace and safety” of the country, without hearing or trial. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to say or publish anything “false, scandalous and malicious” about the federal government, or Congress.

the “right of freely examining public characters and measures” was “the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

“Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence.... In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Freedom of the press was not a privilege accorded journalists; it was another name for citizen responsibility. “It is the duty as well as right of intelligent and faithful citizens to discuss” the errors of their representatives, both “to control them by the censorship of the public opinion” and “to promote a remedy according to the rules of the constitution”—that is, to elect new representatives at the next election.

Madison and Jefferson shared two goals, and two prejudices, which would guide their foreign policy for the next eight years and beyond. The goals were peace and expansion; the prejudices were a disposition to trust France and to distrust Britain. [...]
Jefferson’s and Madison’s agreement on their two goals and their two prejudices gave their actions consistency and, in many cases, force. But it could also blind them to difficulties and failure. [...]
Their peace policy was not a passive one, however. American commerce, they believed, was so valuable to the world that it could be used as a weapon instead of armies and frigates.

Republican presidents could act swiftly, decisively, and even extralegally when their foreign policy interests were clear.

Madison biographers who want their hero to be consistent in all things will not be pleased with this analysis; political philosophers who value intellectual elegance and constitutional lawyers, who seek guidance from the Father of the Constitution, will be even less so. But we have to remember Madison’s job: politics.

It should be enough for us that a great mind gave it his best thoughts for as long as Madison did.

Madison was the last framer standing. Loneliness increased his eminence, like a hill on a plain.

Making book lists was an old pastime of theirs; it was a form of vicarious shopping, vicarious reading, almost vicarious thinking.

On the question of slavery, all Madison’s intelligence and political skills amounted to nothing. His statesmanship failed, and in failing he typified the founding generation, instead of leading it.